JOH06:SAFRICA;PRETORIA,10MAY94- Cuban President Fidel Castro turns the tables on photographers as he takes their picture with a borrowed camera at the Presidency building, prior to the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of South Africa May 10. ptb/Desmond Boylan REUTER CAT

Photo: Desmond Boylan

JOH06:SAFRICA;PRETORIA,10MAY94- Cuban President Fidel Castro turns...

Nikon will stop making most of its film cameras / Company shifts focus to market digital products

Nikon Corp., one of the flagship brands for amateur and professional photographers alike, will stop making most of its film-camera products to concentrate on marketing digital cameras.

"Nikon Corporation has made the decision to focus management resources on digital cameras in place of film cameras. This decision will allow Nikon to continue to develop products that match the demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace," the Japanese company said in a statement posted Wednesday on a Web site for its British division. The company said more than 95 percent of its British business is now in the digital market.

Nikon spokesmen in the United States were initially unfamiliar with the company's British statement, which was linked to several technology-oriented Web sites. They later issued a similar version that said the film-camera line is being "reshaped" to allow "more of Nikon's planning, engineering and manufacturing resources to be focused on the digital products that now drive our thriving industry."

Nikon said it will immediately stop making all but two of its film cameras, all large-format Nikkor lenses and enlarging lenses and several manual-focus Nikkor lenses. It expects to sell the last of those products this summer. Nikon will continue to manufacture and sell two film cameras, the professional-level F6 and the FM10 for the amateur market, and a few manual-focus lenses for those cameras.

The company's U.S. Web site currently shows a lineup of nine single-lens-reflex film cameras, including the F6 and FM10.

"To use a car industry analogy, it would be the same as Ford saying it is no longer producing an internal combustion engine. It's really that revolutionary," said Mark Greenberg, a professional photographer who has shot for National Geographic, Life and People magazine. "Film is done. Digital rules the world now."

Analyst Christopher Chute of technology research firm IDC said the Nikon announcement was the first he has heard of a major camera company moving so completely out of the film camera business, but that he would not be surprised if other camera-makers also do so.

A decade ago, digital cameras cost thousands of dollars, required technical proficiency to use and offered unclear images that took up large amounts of space on expensive memory cards. As prices for digital cameras and memory cards dropped year after year -- and started to beat the prices and picture quality offered by film cameras -- digital cameras rapidly took over the market.

Digital cameras began to outsell film cameras in the past two years, according to analysts.

Chute said photography has lost its identity in the digital era and become a subset of the consumer electronics industry. Camera-makers such as Eastman Kodak Co. have experimented with gadgets such as digital cameras that double as MP3 players. Kodak has worked hard to reinvent itself in the digital era. After years of retooling -- and laying off thousands of workers in its film division -- Kodak is No. 1 in the U.S. digital-camera market, closely followed by Canon Inc. and Sony Corp. For years, analysts predicted that the advent of the digital era could mean the demise of Kodak, a U.S. company that helped invent photography, because consumers would no longer need film.

The first Nikon film camera appeared in 1948, though the company's history goes back nearly to the turn of the 19th century, when it made optical glass and microscopes. An early Nikon digital still camera, developed with Fuji Photo Film Co., appeared in 1995. Recent Nikon models helped pioneer the use of wireless technology in digital cameras to allow users to upload and print their photos.